REDD+

The efficacy of attempts to sustainably manage forests and conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks in Zimbabwe is increasingly coming under scrutiny as new research warns that the politics of access and control over forests and their carbon is challenging conventional understanding.

With the U.N. Climate Change conference later this year in Paris fast approaching, Zimbabwe's climate change commitments face the slow progress on an issue that continues to stalk other developing countries – climate finance.

As climate talks wind down in Bonn, Germany, observers of the negotiations say that despite some progress on a draft text, key issues remain unresolved and will carry over at least until the next round in August.

Norwegians know something of life in a climate change world. Migratory birds arrive earlier in spring, trees come into leaf before previously expected, and palsa mires (wetlands) are being lost as permafrost thaws.

Latin America’s parliaments have failed to protect the forests and to guarantee their sustainable use, despite the fact that a number of countries have laws on forests, legislators from the region said at a global summit in the Mexican capital.

Comprised of over 17,000 islands that are highly susceptible to rising seas, Indonesia is taking stock of its position as the world’s third leading emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China.

The rural communities of San Miguel and Santo Tomás Ajusco, to the south of Mexico City, are preserving 3,000 of their 7,619 hectares of forest in exchange for payment for environmental services. But the inequality in the communities is far from ecological.

Civil society and advocacy groups are warning that a prominent carbon-reduction initiative, aimed at curbing global emissions, is undermining land tenure rights for indigenous communities, putting their livelihoods at risk.

The U.N. climate talks in Warsaw ended in dramatic fashion Saturday evening in what looked like a schoolyard fight with a mob of dark-suited supporters packed around the weary combatants, Todd Stern of the United States and Sai Navoti of Fiji representing G77 nations.

Guyana is engaged in a balancing act to save its rainforest, regarded as a living treasure, from the destructive activities of miners digging their way to another kind of treasure buried beneath this fragile ecosystem.

Uncertainty over property rights and access to forest land is potentially a major stumbling block for implementing the United Nations collaborative initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in Cameroon.

Burkina Faso has just received a grant of 30 million dollars from the Forest Investment Programme to help protect the country's forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with deforestation.

Issues related to the ownership of forest carbon and to prior consultation mechanisms threaten to derail plans for the Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Forests (REDD+) in some countries of Latin America, according to experts.

More than two dozen environmental organisations are urging California Governor Jerry Brown to disregard recommendations from a United Nations task force to include so-called forest “offsets” in the state’s new emissions-trading scheme.

Nascent carbon emissions-trading exchanges in several countries are increasingly looking at options to interlink with one another, which advocates say would offer investors long-term stability, increase revenues for the development of renewable energy and strengthen corporate support for climate policy.

Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report.